Get in front of a video camera

I’m currently away from the office on a bit of a working holiday, and this has given me the opportunity to write some scripts, play around with some ideas for new Progression projects and test our a new video camera! Nothing too fancy on the camera front, I’d loved to have bought my XH A1 with me but its too big and I just don’t have room for it. So I decide to try out a small Canon solid state handycam – I found an HF100 for £500 and the results have been pretty good. I’ll post some more about the camera later but I wanted to mention it as its relevent to the rest of the post.

So today I filmed my girlfirend Fi kitesurfing. She’s at that intermediate stage, learning to jump, perfecting her toeside riding and getting smooth carving turns. Anyway, I filmed her for half an hour trying everything in both directions and then we watched it back over lunch. Now I spotted a few things as I was filming but the interesting thing was I held back saying anything until after we watched the video. Now some of the more technical stuff like getting her jumping timing spot on, needed some discussion but the interest part was with riding toeside. Watch this video of her below.

She spotted her mistake straight away, with no prompting from me. As soon as she watched it she said “Why do I keep taking my hand off the bar, I slow down everytime, I didn’t even really think that I did that”.

Maybe its time you get out there, grab a friend or partner to film you and see what you look like? Yeah, they’ll be loads of “oh my god I look crap or I though I was jumping so high!” but at least you now know and can get out there and try and get a bit better a bit quicker.

And why did I mention the new camera earlier? Well, it was to show you don’t need some fancy camera to get some footage that will show you want you are doing wrong and right. My tripod over here is shockly bad but I work around that, the camera isn’t great at everything (the zoom is way to short) but you can work around those limitations too. Just get out there and try it out and see how it works out.

Whatever level you are at, seeing yourself making mistake is vital to getting the most from any sport. Tomorrow Fi is gonna film me so I can look at horror at how bad I have become – and get better! This is what Progression is all about, using video to help you understand what you need to do to get better and enjoy the sport even more.

Progression Sports specialise in producing high quality and in-depth instructional content that is loved by riders, instructors and schools. We started 10 years ago and since then have sold over 90,000 kitesurfing DVDs and are now closing in on 40,000 users for our Progression Player App.